October 28, 2009 • 16 mins
Over the course of her life, Marie Laveau wielded enormous influence as the notorious Voodoo Queen of New Orleans -- but how much of her story is true? Join Sarah and Katie as they unravel the fact and fiction surrounding the legendary Marie Levaeu.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how
stuff works dot com. You've heard the rumors before, perhaps
and whispers written between the lines of the textbooks. Conspiracies,
paranormal events, all those things that disappear from the official explanations.
(00:23):
Tune in and learn more of this stuff they don't
want you to know in this video podcast from how
stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And Sarah and
I were talking today about wanting to get out of
(00:45):
Atlanta and picturing ourselves in far flung locales, but we
were thinking of someplace a little closer in New Orleans, drivable,
perhaps perhaps drivable. Yes, I have had one fantastic trip
there to jazz Fast, one terrible one to Marty and
failed one where my house ended up falling through with
the last second and I didn't end up going at
(01:05):
least your house didn't actually fall through, true where you
were going with a terrible joke. Anyways, I've had too,
probably equally fantastic trips to New Orleans. Both were for
Marti Gras. But um, today we're going to talk a
little bit about New Orleans voodoo past and present, because
(01:26):
it is October and Helloween, and we're going to talk
about Marie Laveau, who was both feared and revered, and
you will still see references to Marie Lavaux all over
New Orleans, Marie Levo Voodoo Shop, even, I think. And
the legend of Marie Lavaux was that she could do
pretty much anything with her voodoo magic. She could make
(01:48):
people crawl on their bellies, she could make your husband disappear,
or she hypnotized the police. She danced with snakes, she
could make you sleep with people you didn't want to
sleep with. So she was a lot of bad magic.
I guess my favorite detail about Marie lava is that
she supposedly had a twenty foot long snake named Zombie
that she would go dance with. And yeah, she also
(02:10):
dressed like a gypsy and had big gold earrings, probably
like a Halloween costume one of us would put together
and rings, and yeah, these dances with the snake are
very much part of her legend. They pop up in
almost every account you read of her. But that's the thing,
it is a legend and not entirely based on fact,
(02:34):
and the reason for that is because there aren't a
lot of primary sources from this particular time in New
Orleans history, and a lot of it is just hearsay
accounts and you know, people telling stories of things that
they've heard. Yeah, there are also a lot of Marie
la those and some of them are related to her,
and then some of them aren't. And then a lot
(02:56):
of her public records are just missing. Like many free
people of color at the time, their their records are
literally razored out of documents because some people, I think,
go back to look at their records and realize their
ancestors or on who they thought they were leaning up
their family history and getting rid of them, or they
(03:17):
think it's cool to find something about Marie Lava and
they're just cutting it out of the book. Please don't
do that, So the love of research. Well, and also
Marie Lavau didn't write anything of her own right. She
was illiterate, so she wasn't keeping any records of us
for us to look at. So we've got a historical
Marie Lava or two and also this legend of mure Lava.
(03:38):
So we're going to try to weave them both together.
And some of this will be entirely true, and some
of it, well, not so much. We'll try to tell
you when So, Marie Lava lived on St. Anne's Street, which,
of course there's an interesting story even about how she
got her house. Um, it was said that a wealthy
white client had a son who was in trouble with
(04:01):
the law, and Marie Lavo works some voodoo magic and
got the son off the hook, and ingratitude, the father
gave her this house. This is really unlikely. She actually
didn't even own the house on St. Anne, but she
did live there most of her adult life. But that's
the story, and it's the story we like. Supposedly, she
(04:22):
did a lot of things with prisoners. She would get
people acquitted even when they were at the gallows somehow
and they would disappear. Part of the key to Marie
Lavo's status as this voodoo queen, with this powerful greegree
she had a network of informants by making friends with
all the servants in the very affluent houses of New
Orleans and curing them of their ailments and fixing their
(04:46):
life's worries, and so they gave her information whenever she
needed it. Yeah, so if she was working for a
wealthy white client, and she happened to know all of
his servants. She was going to be able to have
worked otent magical cure because she knows what I'll need exactly. So,
but we're gonna talk a little bit about where Marie
(05:06):
Lavo actually came from and how she became this voodoo
queen in the first place. She was born in the
via career in seventeen ninety four or maybe eighteen o one, um,
but either way, it's before New Orleans was part of
America from the Louisiana purchase, and she was rumored to
(05:27):
be the daughter of a wealthy planter and a slave
woman who was perhaps also part Native American. But later
historians have suggested that Lva's father was in fact a
free man of color, and stuff I found was saying
that she was born to a free woman of color
instead of a slave woman, and to a Frenchman a
(05:47):
plantation owner. So her beginnings are very muddled. That will
be theme in the life of Marie Lavo. And no
one agrees what color she is to People call her
basically every hue there is, but everyone Indian, Native, American, white, Yeah, thanks,
everyone agrees. She was very beautiful, which is probably another
really important aspect of her power. Her power. One of
(06:11):
our sources said that she attended convent school, so she
had a little Catholic background, and then she was married
at seventeen to her first husband, Jacques. I don't know
if it's Paris or Paris, so we're just going to
stick with Paris, who was a quadroon from Santa Mingue.
And they were really stallacious rumors about how she eventually
got rid of him, And I mean, the guy might
(06:33):
have just died, but people would suggest, oh, he beat
her and she made him disappear, or he wasn't faithful
and she made sure he went away. And I wonder
she didn't discourage the rumors because they made her seem
more powerful. Anyway, Yeah, definitely, if you can get rid
of your own husband, you might be able to do
(06:53):
that for clients. But anyways, after that, she's known as
the Widow Paris until I mean, the even when she
takes up a partnership with a white man who is
essentially her husband, they can't marry because he's white, even
though some people suggested that he adopted a bi racial identity.
To Marrie the Double Life, that probably didn't happen. Um,
(07:15):
but this is Christophe Lapion, and they lived together for
the rest of their lives. They're buried next to each other,
and they have anywhere from five to fifteen children, which
is a pretty big difference. We found different numbers pretty
much everywhere we looked. But it wasn't rare for white
men to live with Creole women in a sort of
(07:38):
common law marriage, even recognizing their children together and uh,
in legal ways like that. And some of what I
was looking at was saying that Marie Lavaux was both
a devout Catholic and someone who practiced foodo, which might
sound kind of crazy unless you know a little bit
(07:58):
more about the origin of voodoo. Yeah, voodoo it encompasses
more than just voodoo dolls or the little trinkets you're
gonna see if you visit New Orleans during Marty Girl
or something. But um, it's it's more about philosophy, medicine, justice,
and religion. It's kind of got everything wrapped into into one.
(08:22):
And Haitian voodoo was a sacred slave religion and according
to one of the scholars, I was reading, a collective
form of rebellion and it was suppressed in both Louisiana
and in Haiti before the revolution. But in eighteen o
nine a whole bunch of Haitian refugees came to New
Orleans and they brought their own version of voodoo with them,
which mixed with the African religions the slaves they're already had,
(08:45):
and also with Catholicism, so that became a new form
of voodoo that was practiced in New Orleans in the
nineteenth and twentie centuries. You can think of it as
like Afro Catholicism and New Orleans voodoo is based on Aimism,
which is an belief in nature that was from Africa
and that was modified in in Haiti to throw in
(09:09):
this stuff about the zombies and the spirit world and
demons and ghosts um, which I actually I think would
work well with saints and devils and various aspects of yeah,
and the Roman Catholicism uh side to it all made
it a little more palatable for officials, um if it yeah,
if if they were saints and not spirits or ghosts
(09:32):
or something. And there was a place called Congo Square
in New Orleans where people would come to do some
of their voodoo. Hundreds sometimes thousands of free and blacks
and slavery came to dance and sing and got their
drums out and did little voodoo rituals and the thing
(09:52):
freaked out all the city fathers. But Marie Lavaux was
a very central part of that. And part of why
mari Lavaux is so interesting and still today people are
kind of obsessed with her is that she walked the
border between these two worlds, between this Catholic world and
which you know is still very strong in parts of
New Orleans, and then this voodoo world that people didn't
(10:15):
know anything about. And she was so powerful. She was
this really powerful black figure well, and she walked the
line between the white world and the people of color.
I mean, she weirdly has this reputation of being a
kind of racial reformer, right, but she owned slaves with
(10:37):
her husband and set them free and sold them many
many people of color, freed people of color would buy
slaves with the intention of freeing them. But that was
not uh, that was not her intentions. So she she
kind of skirts a lot of different boundaries about religion
and race and um. The power of this woman who
(11:01):
was illiterate and probably shouldn't be as famous as she
is now. If it weren't for this mythic image she's
created of herself, she's not easily categorized, I think, which
is part of it. But also she had such a
wealth of information, which you've mentioned earlier, of being in
(11:23):
contact with all these incredibly wealthy people and also their slaves.
She knew everything about everyone, and that's a completely different
kind of power that you don't need voodoo for. But
it turns out there actually may have been two Marie Lavas,
So when we're talking about Marie Laveaux, we're actually talking
about these two women and possibly more, Marie the first
(11:45):
and Marie the second, and Marie the second is likely
Marie the first daughter Marie Eucharst from one of the
sources I was reading, one of those five to fift
kids of hers, And it makes sense that the line
between them is so confusing, because if the Marie's are
(12:07):
making their reputation off of blurring these boundaries, how great
it is it if you have two women or maybe
one and they have the same name. Nobody knows. Yeah,
And obviously for for Marie to her mother is this
local celebrity and very successful practitioner voodoo it's in her
(12:29):
best interests to kind of keep that family business going
and um stir up that confusion. Marie too was a hairdresser,
again to a lot of very wealthy New Orleanans. So
I mean, think about it when you go to the
salon and your hairdresser starts talking and asking you questions,
and then you know, you might end up telling all
(12:49):
your secrets and it might come in handy later when
you need some help. Supposedly, also, we're going back to
the legend one of the Marie's or both of them
ares help slaves escape and also built this crazy cult
off like poncha train and New Orleans sacrificed roosters. Yes,
it was supposed to be very scandalous because apparently the
(13:12):
police came and not only was it the slaves they
expected to find there and some of the free people
of color, but also the affluent whites of the city
as well from the very good families. And it was
quite the scandal. And people still go to New Orleans
looking for this kind of voodoo, dark magic. New Orleans
just has that reputation not only as you know, the
(13:34):
city of sin, but also this place where things can
happen or they can't happen in other places well, and
they go trying to a lot of people go trying
to figure out the story of the Mariela those there
have been all these books written about her recently, and
um just either going to really embrace this made up
(13:54):
crazy stuff that's associated with her or try to figure
out who the real person was. And that's part to
the appeal because you can't, You absolutely cannot. There will
never be an answer. So you can come up with
your own opinion, and we've certainly come up with ours.
But the legend persists. And one of our favorites was
the smith that if you go to the tomb of
Marie Lavaux and market with three xs, she will grant
(14:16):
you a wish. And the cemetery people do not think
highly on this. And I saw a picture of her tomb.
It looks pretty dingy with all the markings on it.
It's kind of like Oscar Wilde's tomb paraly Shas with
all the kind of greasy looking lipstick kissing marks on it. Yeah,
not not cool. And I think some people even break
(14:39):
off like bits of other tombs so they can make
little marks, which is disrespectful to the dead, but her
tomb is one of the most visited graves in the
United States um and it's estimated to have doubled since
the early ninety nineties. The visitors to to the resting
place of Marie Lavou And even that's confusing because we're
not quite sure who's very there. Is it Marie One,
(15:01):
is it Marie Too? Or is it both of them?
Which some sources say because part of the inscription seems
like it's talking about Marie Too, the date of death
and her age, which cannot possibly apply to Marie One,
But the other part of it refers to Marie One.
It's talking about, you know, family of the widow Paris,
which could only be her. So is one of them
(15:21):
buried a top the other or was there just some
sort of confusion? No one knows well. And after both
the Marie's are gone from New Orleans, whenever that happened,
because Marie Too actually disappeared completely and during the reconstruction
disappeared completely. After they're both gone, the voodoo community in
(15:42):
New Orleans starts to change and fragment and sort of
the more touristy stuff that we think of now. And
that's really a lot more associated with who do which
is evil magic and like bad juju and it's used
for harm. So that's are like the pens and the
doll and stuff like that. Um, and that's what supplants
(16:06):
this this very tradition oriented voodoo that the Maries are
known for. So if you'd like to learn more about
how zombies work and the origins of voodoo and how
voodoo works, come to our website at www dot how
stuff works dot com, or if you have your own
Maria Lava one or two legends, you can email us
(16:29):
at History podcast at how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think,
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and be sure to check out the stuff you missed
in History Class blog on the how stuff works dot
com home page
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how
stuff works dot com. You've heard the rumors before, perhaps
and whispers written between the lines of the textbooks. Conspiracies,
paranormal events, all those things that disappear from the official explanations.
(00:23):
Tune in and learn more of this stuff they don't
want you to know in this video podcast from how
stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And Sarah and
I were talking today about wanting to get out of
(00:45):
Atlanta and picturing ourselves in far flung locales, but we
were thinking of someplace a little closer in New Orleans, drivable,
perhaps perhaps drivable. Yes, I have had one fantastic trip
there to jazz Fast, one terrible one to Marty and
failed one where my house ended up falling through with
the last second and I didn't end up going at
(01:05):
least your house didn't actually fall through, true where you
were going with a terrible joke. Anyways, I've had too,
probably equally fantastic trips to New Orleans. Both were for
Marti Gras. But um, today we're going to talk a
little bit about New Orleans voodoo past and present, because
(01:26):
it is October and Helloween, and we're going to talk
about Marie Laveau, who was both feared and revered, and
you will still see references to Marie Lavaux all over
New Orleans, Marie Levo Voodoo Shop, even, I think. And
the legend of Marie Lavaux was that she could do
pretty much anything with her voodoo magic. She could make
(01:48):
people crawl on their bellies, she could make your husband disappear,
or she hypnotized the police. She danced with snakes, she
could make you sleep with people you didn't want to
sleep with. So she was a lot of bad magic.
I guess my favorite detail about Marie lava is that
she supposedly had a twenty foot long snake named Zombie
that she would go dance with. And yeah, she also
(02:10):
dressed like a gypsy and had big gold earrings, probably
like a Halloween costume one of us would put together
and rings, and yeah, these dances with the snake are
very much part of her legend. They pop up in
almost every account you read of her. But that's the thing,
it is a legend and not entirely based on fact,
(02:34):
and the reason for that is because there aren't a
lot of primary sources from this particular time in New
Orleans history, and a lot of it is just hearsay
accounts and you know, people telling stories of things that
they've heard. Yeah, there are also a lot of Marie
la those and some of them are related to her,
and then some of them aren't. And then a lot
(02:56):
of her public records are just missing. Like many free
people of color at the time, their their records are
literally razored out of documents because some people, I think,
go back to look at their records and realize their
ancestors or on who they thought they were leaning up
their family history and getting rid of them, or they
(03:17):
think it's cool to find something about Marie Lava and
they're just cutting it out of the book. Please don't
do that, So the love of research. Well, and also
Marie Lavau didn't write anything of her own right. She
was illiterate, so she wasn't keeping any records of us
for us to look at. So we've got a historical
Marie Lava or two and also this legend of mure Lava.
(03:38):
So we're going to try to weave them both together.
And some of this will be entirely true, and some
of it, well, not so much. We'll try to tell
you when So, Marie Lava lived on St. Anne's Street, which,
of course there's an interesting story even about how she
got her house. Um, it was said that a wealthy
white client had a son who was in trouble with
(04:01):
the law, and Marie Lavo works some voodoo magic and
got the son off the hook, and ingratitude, the father
gave her this house. This is really unlikely. She actually
didn't even own the house on St. Anne, but she
did live there most of her adult life. But that's
the story, and it's the story we like. Supposedly, she
(04:22):
did a lot of things with prisoners. She would get
people acquitted even when they were at the gallows somehow
and they would disappear. Part of the key to Marie
Lavo's status as this voodoo queen, with this powerful greegree
she had a network of informants by making friends with
all the servants in the very affluent houses of New
Orleans and curing them of their ailments and fixing their
(04:46):
life's worries, and so they gave her information whenever she
needed it. Yeah, so if she was working for a
wealthy white client, and she happened to know all of
his servants. She was going to be able to have
worked otent magical cure because she knows what I'll need exactly. So,
but we're gonna talk a little bit about where Marie
(05:06):
Lavo actually came from and how she became this voodoo
queen in the first place. She was born in the
via career in seventeen ninety four or maybe eighteen o one, um,
but either way, it's before New Orleans was part of
America from the Louisiana purchase, and she was rumored to
(05:27):
be the daughter of a wealthy planter and a slave
woman who was perhaps also part Native American. But later
historians have suggested that Lva's father was in fact a
free man of color, and stuff I found was saying
that she was born to a free woman of color
instead of a slave woman, and to a Frenchman a
(05:47):
plantation owner. So her beginnings are very muddled. That will
be theme in the life of Marie Lavo. And no
one agrees what color she is to People call her
basically every hue there is, but everyone Indian, Native, American, white, Yeah, thanks,
everyone agrees. She was very beautiful, which is probably another
really important aspect of her power. Her power. One of
(06:11):
our sources said that she attended convent school, so she
had a little Catholic background, and then she was married
at seventeen to her first husband, Jacques. I don't know
if it's Paris or Paris, so we're just going to
stick with Paris, who was a quadroon from Santa Mingue.
And they were really stallacious rumors about how she eventually
got rid of him, And I mean, the guy might
(06:33):
have just died, but people would suggest, oh, he beat
her and she made him disappear, or he wasn't faithful
and she made sure he went away. And I wonder
she didn't discourage the rumors because they made her seem
more powerful. Anyway, Yeah, definitely, if you can get rid
of your own husband, you might be able to do
(06:53):
that for clients. But anyways, after that, she's known as
the Widow Paris until I mean, the even when she
takes up a partnership with a white man who is
essentially her husband, they can't marry because he's white, even
though some people suggested that he adopted a bi racial identity.
To Marrie the Double Life, that probably didn't happen. Um,
(07:15):
but this is Christophe Lapion, and they lived together for
the rest of their lives. They're buried next to each other,
and they have anywhere from five to fifteen children, which
is a pretty big difference. We found different numbers pretty
much everywhere we looked. But it wasn't rare for white
men to live with Creole women in a sort of
(07:38):
common law marriage, even recognizing their children together and uh,
in legal ways like that. And some of what I
was looking at was saying that Marie Lavaux was both
a devout Catholic and someone who practiced foodo, which might
sound kind of crazy unless you know a little bit
(07:58):
more about the origin of voodoo. Yeah, voodoo it encompasses
more than just voodoo dolls or the little trinkets you're
gonna see if you visit New Orleans during Marty Girl
or something. But um, it's it's more about philosophy, medicine, justice,
and religion. It's kind of got everything wrapped into into one.
(08:22):
And Haitian voodoo was a sacred slave religion and according
to one of the scholars, I was reading, a collective
form of rebellion and it was suppressed in both Louisiana
and in Haiti before the revolution. But in eighteen o
nine a whole bunch of Haitian refugees came to New
Orleans and they brought their own version of voodoo with them,
which mixed with the African religions the slaves they're already had,
(08:45):
and also with Catholicism, so that became a new form
of voodoo that was practiced in New Orleans in the
nineteenth and twentie centuries. You can think of it as
like Afro Catholicism and New Orleans voodoo is based on Aimism,
which is an belief in nature that was from Africa
and that was modified in in Haiti to throw in
(09:09):
this stuff about the zombies and the spirit world and
demons and ghosts um, which I actually I think would
work well with saints and devils and various aspects of yeah,
and the Roman Catholicism uh side to it all made
it a little more palatable for officials, um if it yeah,
if if they were saints and not spirits or ghosts
(09:32):
or something. And there was a place called Congo Square
in New Orleans where people would come to do some
of their voodoo. Hundreds sometimes thousands of free and blacks
and slavery came to dance and sing and got their
drums out and did little voodoo rituals and the thing
(09:52):
freaked out all the city fathers. But Marie Lavaux was
a very central part of that. And part of why
mari Lavaux is so interesting and still today people are
kind of obsessed with her is that she walked the
border between these two worlds, between this Catholic world and
which you know is still very strong in parts of
New Orleans, and then this voodoo world that people didn't
(10:15):
know anything about. And she was so powerful. She was
this really powerful black figure well, and she walked the
line between the white world and the people of color.
I mean, she weirdly has this reputation of being a
kind of racial reformer, right, but she owned slaves with
(10:37):
her husband and set them free and sold them many
many people of color, freed people of color would buy
slaves with the intention of freeing them. But that was
not uh, that was not her intentions. So she she
kind of skirts a lot of different boundaries about religion
and race and um. The power of this woman who
(11:01):
was illiterate and probably shouldn't be as famous as she
is now. If it weren't for this mythic image she's
created of herself, she's not easily categorized, I think, which
is part of it. But also she had such a
wealth of information, which you've mentioned earlier, of being in
(11:23):
contact with all these incredibly wealthy people and also their slaves.
She knew everything about everyone, and that's a completely different
kind of power that you don't need voodoo for. But
it turns out there actually may have been two Marie Lavas,
So when we're talking about Marie Laveaux, we're actually talking
about these two women and possibly more, Marie the first
(11:45):
and Marie the second, and Marie the second is likely
Marie the first daughter Marie Eucharst from one of the
sources I was reading, one of those five to fift
kids of hers, And it makes sense that the line
between them is so confusing, because if the Marie's are
(12:07):
making their reputation off of blurring these boundaries, how great
it is it if you have two women or maybe
one and they have the same name. Nobody knows. Yeah,
And obviously for for Marie to her mother is this
local celebrity and very successful practitioner voodoo it's in her
(12:29):
best interests to kind of keep that family business going
and um stir up that confusion. Marie too was a hairdresser,
again to a lot of very wealthy New Orleanans. So
I mean, think about it when you go to the
salon and your hairdresser starts talking and asking you questions,
and then you know, you might end up telling all
(12:49):
your secrets and it might come in handy later when
you need some help. Supposedly, also, we're going back to
the legend one of the Marie's or both of them
ares help slaves escape and also built this crazy cult
off like poncha train and New Orleans sacrificed roosters. Yes,
it was supposed to be very scandalous because apparently the
(13:12):
police came and not only was it the slaves they
expected to find there and some of the free people
of color, but also the affluent whites of the city
as well from the very good families. And it was
quite the scandal. And people still go to New Orleans
looking for this kind of voodoo, dark magic. New Orleans
just has that reputation not only as you know, the
(13:34):
city of sin, but also this place where things can
happen or they can't happen in other places well, and
they go trying to a lot of people go trying
to figure out the story of the Mariela those there
have been all these books written about her recently, and
um just either going to really embrace this made up
(13:54):
crazy stuff that's associated with her or try to figure
out who the real person was. And that's part to
the appeal because you can't, You absolutely cannot. There will
never be an answer. So you can come up with
your own opinion, and we've certainly come up with ours.
But the legend persists. And one of our favorites was
the smith that if you go to the tomb of
Marie Lavaux and market with three xs, she will grant
(14:16):
you a wish. And the cemetery people do not think
highly on this. And I saw a picture of her tomb.
It looks pretty dingy with all the markings on it.
It's kind of like Oscar Wilde's tomb paraly Shas with
all the kind of greasy looking lipstick kissing marks on it. Yeah,
not not cool. And I think some people even break
(14:39):
off like bits of other tombs so they can make
little marks, which is disrespectful to the dead, but her
tomb is one of the most visited graves in the
United States um and it's estimated to have doubled since
the early ninety nineties. The visitors to to the resting
place of Marie Lavou And even that's confusing because we're
not quite sure who's very there. Is it Marie One,
(15:01):
is it Marie Too? Or is it both of them?
Which some sources say because part of the inscription seems
like it's talking about Marie Too, the date of death
and her age, which cannot possibly apply to Marie One,
But the other part of it refers to Marie One.
It's talking about, you know, family of the widow Paris,
which could only be her. So is one of them
(15:21):
buried a top the other or was there just some
sort of confusion? No one knows well. And after both
the Marie's are gone from New Orleans, whenever that happened,
because Marie Too actually disappeared completely and during the reconstruction
disappeared completely. After they're both gone, the voodoo community in
(15:42):
New Orleans starts to change and fragment and sort of
the more touristy stuff that we think of now. And
that's really a lot more associated with who do which
is evil magic and like bad juju and it's used
for harm. So that's are like the pens and the
doll and stuff like that. Um, and that's what supplants
(16:06):
this this very tradition oriented voodoo that the Maries are
known for. So if you'd like to learn more about
how zombies work and the origins of voodoo and how
voodoo works, come to our website at www dot how
stuff works dot com, or if you have your own
Maria Lava one or two legends, you can email us
(16:29):
at History podcast at how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think,
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and be sure to check out the stuff you missed
in History Class blog on the how stuff works dot
com home page
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